day sixty seven

I had planted a few snapdragons in the front garden today, hoping that the sunlight there would qualify as "full sun" (I might be optimistic more than realistic, here), and took a few pictures, remembering to try out new apertures.

Then I came inside, and my husband informed me that the Yoshino Cherry Blossom tree we planted in the backyard to commemorate Liam's birth started to bloom.  Back outside!

Using Nikon 50mm f1.4G, manual mode, f/2.8, shutter speed 1/200 sec, ISO 100

I had a lot of fun taking pictures of this tree.  For starters, for someone who is five foot tall wearing sneakers, I was finally of a decent height to get different angles of the branches, though as it turned out, shooting with the sky as a backdrop turned out to be a great choice.  Second, I did take this exact shot with different apertures, and ended up liking the f/2.8 the best for this particular photo.  It captured more of the branch and buds (f/1.4 pretty much only focused in on the main blossoms) while still decently blurring out the background.  I'll have to keep this up!